OCZ Vertex 4 officially launched

When it first showed up at Cebit we were quite eager to see OCZ and Indilinx first high-end SSD, and with Everest 2 controller, it certainly looked like OCZ is on the right path. The wait is finally over and by the looks of it, OCZ's fourth-generation of Vertex drives will shake things up a bit.

Sandforce was a big player on the market with its controllers and Intel wasn't going anywhere. We kind of hoped that OCZ could score big with this one as competition will certainly be good for consumers and price per GB of SSD storage will definitely go down.

OCZ has now officially launched its Vertex 4 SSD based on new Indilinx/OCZ Everest 2 controller. The new Vertex 2 will be available, at least for now, in 128, 256 and 512GB capacities. The new Everest 2 controller brings SATA 6Gbps interface, Ndurance 2.0 tech with reduced write amplification without compression, advanced multi-level ECC, adaptive NAND flahs management and redundant NAND array technology, as well as, auto-encryption and AES-256 support, advanced ECC engine and superior flexibility with extensive NAND compatiblity.

All three currently launched Vertex 4 models, will use 25nm synchronous MLC NAND chips combined with 1GB of DDR3-800 cache, but the drive will use either 256, 512 or full 1GB of cache depending on the model. According to the spec list, the 128GB model has maximum read and write speeds set at 535MB/s and 200MB/s with random read and write IOPS at 90 and 85k. The max IOPS is set at 120k. The next in line is the 256GB model with 535MB/s and 380MB/s max read and write transfer speeds while random read and write IOPS is set at same 90 and 85k.

The current flagship 512GB Vertex 4 model has max sequential read and write transfer speeds of up to 535MB/s and 475MB/s while IOPS is the same as on other two models.

According to some of the first online reviews it looks like OCZ's Vertex 4 has a bright future indeed. The performance is certainly there and no other currently available drive can touch it. There are few kinks that OCZ has already promised to fix with a firmware update, and we honestly hope they will.

The price was certainly a piece of information that has surprised us the most. We were expecting insane pricing as this is, after all, high-performance SSD, but apparently, pricing is pretty much in line with Intel's 520 SSD. The 128GB Vertex 4 will launch with US $179 MSRP, while 256GB and 512GB one should hit retail/e-tail with US $349 and US $699 price tags. We were told that we are looking at a hard launch here and drives should be available pretty soon.

The price is still over $1 per GB but then again we are still talking about high-end SSD with impressive performance.